Zadie Smith

White Teeth had several strikes against it.

1. It’s found in every airport bookstore.
2. It’s always on display tables with Bridget Jones.
3. The back cover had a big picture of the author.
4. The author is too pretty.

None of those disqualify a book for me. I enjoyed Bridget Jones, and Nick Hornby’s in every airport, and Steinbeck made sure readers knew what he looked like, and there’s plenty of room in the world for pretty people. When you put them all together, though, it sets a certain expectation.

Zadie Smith far surpassed that expectation!

Although the book could be lumped in with the recent wave of immigrant-lit, Smith’s story swells in breadth and depth beyond the usual nobody-loves-me themes. She creates on a multi-generational tale with major political and religious themes, and she juggles it masterfully with wit and compassion. She restored my hope that Britain may still produce great authors.

If there’s no “Writing the Opposite Sex” award, there should be, and it should go to her. The only woman I’ve read who manages it as well is Pearl S. Buck-but Buck’s job is easier since she doesn’t bother with humor. Unfortunately, her female characters don’t seem nearly so alive. All of them play one-trait roles and seem merely to propel the story of the male protagonists even when the story switches to their point of view.

The only other weakness in the book comes from her lack of empathy for those with strong religious views. Jehovah’s Witnesses are fairly easy targets, but she spends a lot of energy knocking them down. I appreciate her depiction of Euro-Muslim extremists as wanna-be gangsters without business sense, but the comedy seems like a veneer over a general inability to appreciate faith. Regardless of her faith or lack thereof, this is a weakness that I hope she overcomes in future books.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Several years ago, I came across an instrument in Hanoi that sounded amazingly like an blues guitar. It had only one string, but it could produce these great slides and bends—fascinating. But after a few weeks of hearing the same slides and bends on the same single string, I began to wonder if maybe there was a reason traditional Vietnamese music hasn’t translated well.

Jhumpa Lahiri is in danger of becoming a very fine one-string guitar.

Interpreter of Maladies is a fine story. I could imagine reading it several more times.

By the time I finished the collection by the same name, I felt as though I had. No, on second thought, that’s an overstatement. Her stories aren’t nearly as redundant as those of Thom Jones, and even Amy Hempel and Don Delillo recycle.

Maybe the problem is that some authors start writing and receiving praise while they’re too young. Their world begins to shrink to fit the praise of their first fans, and they lose appreciation for the characters and themes they haven’t already written.

Interpreter is a collection of traditionally-constructed stories, all set at a slow pace and minor key. “This Blessed House” injects some mild humor in relationships, but the collection seems generally designed for readers who think NPR is a little too light-hearted.

The Namesake develops the male-Indian-immigrant character (there is really only one in her work, although he/it is depicted by a father and a son). Evidently Indian emotions range from bored to mildly depressed, fairly depressed, lonely, alone, discontent, sad, discouraged, bland, calm, passive, pensive, and not really upset. The father’s odyssey involves to America for grad school, settling down, and making occasional trips back to India. The son’s adventures take him from the New England lower-middle-class suburbs all the way to New England upper-middle-class lakesides. His relationships include traditional Indian and traditional yuppie. (I know the word’s dated, but the relationships feel that way, too.) I haven’t seen the movie, but it’s not hard to imagine it being an easy sell to directors who like long close-ups of big-eyed people with pretty skin.

The stories show promise; so far, though, the promise isn’t fulfilled.

Edward Simmen, ed.

North of the Rio Grande is a collection of, mostly, stream-of-conscious slice-of-life pieces by Mexican Americans, Mexicans who immigrated to the U.S., and other U.S. Spanish-speakers.

As a collection, it wasn’t really worth the read. There’s not much variation in the themes and characters, and you don’t read stream-of-conscious for the plot.

Like most anthologies, though, there’s a jewel somewhere. In this case, it was “The Somebody,” by Danny Santiago. The book didn’t sell me on norteamericano authors, but it sold me on Danny Santiago. I’m looking forward to reading more by him.

Bernard Shaw

Should someone who’s life work is helping people recover from alcohol addiction and violence accept money from alcohol and weapons manufacturers? Should society mandate education and curtail freedom of expression in the hope of increasing social equality? Should love of an individual have priority over love of a country?

They’re tough questions. Good questions.

So here’s an idea: rather than look for an answer, let’s just make fun of everyone involved with the questions. Salvation Army workers? Mock them. Alcoholics? Mock. Weapons manufacturers? Mock. Anyone who tries to do something worthwhile and doesn’t make the world perfect? Mock. Mock. Mock.

Bernard Shaw mocks well. He has the cleverness of Oscar Wilde with a lot more bitter attitude, and a worldview that makes every hero fairly despicable and every villain a clown.

When I read Major Barbara (the Salvation Army vs. Big Booze play), I was amazed by the wordplay and timing. Sure, it left me depressed, but the language was amazing.

Moved to Pygmallion next, and my amazement at his language and discouragement at its use both increased.

And then Arms and The Man, throwing in the same types of characters but with comic subjects like romance and heroism.

And I took a break.

I thought it would only last a few months. After all, I had enjoyed each book while reading it, and he had a lot of others, and I was getting into plays.

But I found other authors, including Shaw’s nemesis, Chesterton, and the break has now lasted a happy few decades.

Peter Oliver

Revisionist histories are constant sources of debate. But there are revisionists, and then there are eyewitnesses who had a different point of view. Peter Oliver’s, The Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, falls in the second category. He lived in the colonies, loved England, and hated the semi-literate thugs that tortured His Majesty’s servants, trampled His Majesty’s degrees, and ended up forming a new country.

He’s blustery, and pedantic, and self-righteous, and generally a bore. But I don’t know of many other places you’ll find better documentation that the start of the United States and the start of the kingdom of heaven didn’t coincide.

Lensey Namioka

I’m not a great fan of “ethnic” fiction. By “ethnic fiction,” I don’t mean fiction written by non-EuroAmerican writers or fiction about non-EuroAmerican characters, but that whole genre of fiction that’s really just disguised propaganda for colorblind peace love and understanding.

This dislike started early in me. As a child, I didn’t like any book that could be summarized, “_____ are people too,” or “we’re all the same even though we’re different.”

Those biases are why I was so pleasantly surprised by Yang the Youngest and His Terrible Ear.

It’s a story about children, for children, and it’s a good story. The title character happens to be an immigrant to the U.S., and his problems growing up are aggravated, and made more interesting, by cultural misunderstandings. But the theme is growing up, not growing up-while-being-an-immigrant; discovering who you are, not discovering who you are-as-an-immigrant.

Ninh Bao

“Sir, sir, you want postcards? Souvenirs? Look, here, The Sorrow of War, a very good book. It is illegal here, sir. But I have it. Very good book.”

Every sidewalk salesman in Hanoi had a copy. The cheap paper and poor gluing verified that the copies weren’t being distributed by a major publisher, but most were poorly translated versions of the edited edition.

Hanoi had a problem with the book. The Sorrow of War is fairly typical as war literature goes: stock characters, moral quandaries, lack of clarity regarding right and wrong, etc. It wouldn’t have been a problem if it had merely presented Americans as bad guys. The radical thing was that it portrayed Vietnamese soldiers as fallible, brutal, and cowardly as well. There are no wonderfully honorable characters in the book.

The book lives up to its title. Whether examined for its depiction of soldiers, politics, coming of age, or romance, it’s a sad book.

I’d recommend it for those interested in southeast Asian authors, but it probably won’t change your life otherwise.

Mark Bowden

As I was in the process of reading Blackhawk Down, I gave a simple writing assignment to my immigrant students: “Describe the house you grew up in.”

            The next day, with Blackhawk sitting on my shelf, a bookmark only 50 pages into it, I picked up the first of the essays. The young man described the orange trees, and the tan wall, and the bright dresses of the women who walked in front of his house, across the street from the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu, before “all of it” happened.

            For those who have not read Blackhawk Down, “all of it” refers to the killing of hundreds of Somali men, women, and children, during an ill-conceived attempt to remove a warlord from the Olympic Hotel neighborhood of Mogadishu.

            There is no way I can describe how intensely that book moved me. Granted, I had a more personal link to the text than most of the readers, but most other readers I’ve met have liked it as well.

            Out of respect for my students, I didn’t see the film, which they described as an attempt to make the deaths of hundreds of their friends and family into the story of a few white Americans who made some bad choices. The book, though, does an exceptional job of presenting all of the people as real—and Bowden did excellent work in capturing the point of view of many of the Somalis involved.

            I’d love to read more of his books.

David Herlihy

David Herlihy makes issues of male-female roles and the effects of seasons on family life seem as vital as knights and Crusades and burning at the stake. In other words, he makes normal live seem vibrant and vital, as all historians should but very few do.

If you’re interested in anything medieval, start with Opera Muliebra, and follow it with Medieval Households before moving on to royalty, armor, and heretics.

Ahmed Rashid

            Jihad: the rise of militant Islam in Central Asia, by Ahmed Rashid, struck me initially as strong journalism with a hint of paranoia and cynicism.

            But after spending several years in the regions Rashid describes, I’ve changed my analysis. I would still recommend it to a newcomer, but I now think it’s not paranoid or political enough, and insights I perceived as the result of serious investigative journalism could probably be made by anyone with language skills who was willing to hang out for a few hours with taxi drivers.

He gets some great interviews with officials in political opposition organizations that seem to contradict both the U.S. and Central Asian depictions of those groups.

I’d still recommend it for anyone new to the region.